The single moment that made postwar liberalism feel most like a cause
worth fighting for came in the darkness of April 4, 1968, when an
Indianapolis crowd, assembled to hear Robert F. Kennedy campaign for
the Democratic presidential nomination, instead met a man obliged to
tell them that Martin Luther King Jr. had been murdered. When Kennedy
broke the news, a desperate wail burst from the throats of those
gathered, a sound unlike any other, bespeaking the tide of anguish and
anger about to rush over the republic, sweeping reason before it—but
not yet, or not here, not if Kennedy had his way.

Speaking off the cuff, he claimed a shared sorrow—his own brother had
been killed in the line of political duty, at a time when he had begun
to align himself with King. Thinking of what he had learned from the
violence, Kennedy recited from Aeschylus the lines that had given him
leave to accept that he would never forget or stop feeling pain but
that he could nevertheless carry the cause forward. In the wake of
this new killing Americans could, Kennedy said, divide themselves from
their fellows—but that was not what the country needed. “What we need
in the United States,” he said, was “love and wisdom, and compassion
toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still
suffer within our country, whether they be white or whether they be
black.” And the crowd that had begun listening in grief and despair
now applauded, and unusually among American cities, Indianapolis did
not see violence that night.

Kennedy’s extemporaneous speech summarized the basic elements of
American liberalism at its postwar peak, and on the brink of a
precipitous decline. It was less a philosophy than a political
tendency, and it urged its proponents in the gentle direction of using
politics to do better by their fellow citizens, especially those less
fortunate. But Kennedy’s speech also evoked the essentially emotional
component of liberalism: compassion and—the words were wisely
chosen—“a feeling of justice” for those who suffer. Leading off the
list of Kennedy’s needs, as indeed Paul told the Corinthians it
should, was “love.” It is difficult now to imagine a major political
figure saying that what America most needs is love. But it was not
difficult at just that political moment, and it was not just Robert
Kennedy, either. In his infamous 1964 television commercial featuring
a girl plucking the petals from a daisy, Lyndon Johnson intones over
the image of a mushroom cloud, “We must either love each other, or we
must die.” Even Richard Nixon’s campaign felt compelled to nod at the
discourse of the moment, including in a 1968 campaign ad an image of a
soldier with “LOVE” written on his helmet as the candidate pledged “an
honorable end to the war in Vietnam.”

In that peak moment of liberalism, one could without embarrassment
invoke love as, indeed, all you need; love would do everything that
pop music promised, carry you through the darkness and bind you
together with all the lonely souls in the nation’s night, tiding you
over until the dawn. Certainly there was no other vocabulary, no logic
of self-interest or language of patriotism, that seemed able to
transcend the divisions among Americans and induce them to support
policies for the benefit of others—to do for their country, rather
than for themselves. Love gave liberalism, and liberals, guts.

And yet liberals often—and at last completely—rejected it, succumbing
to a terrible impulse toward mere rationality. Eric Alterman and Kevin
Mattson, in their excellent history of postwar American liberalism,
The Cause, circle back occasionally to Lionel Trilling’s Liberal
Imagination, with its warning that liberalism “drifts toward a denial
of the emotions and the imagination,” becoming “mechanical”—or just
dead. Michael Kazin, in American Dreamers, his history of American
leftists, suggests that it was the radicals—now all but vanished
except as bogeymen—that helped give liberalism life. Each book is a
superb history that shows what master historians at the peak of their
powers and knowledge can do. Each provides opportunities to rethink
the American political tradition.

T
hese books are less about liberalism or leftism than about liberals or
leftists. At the start, Alterman and Mattson define liberalism as
Enlightenment rationalism plus sympathy for the common man—but
sympathy that falls short of socialism. Kazin defines leftism as
radical egalitarianism, including socialism. (Which means both books
get to claim Martin Luther King Jr. and Betty Friedan.) Neither book
has much further to say about these philosophies; both concern
themselves chiefly with history’s protagonists and their struggles.

This biographical approach to political history has great benefits,
chief among them being compulsive readability—human foibles and
triumphs and occasional tragedies make for terrific stories. At the
same time, one often has the sense of sitting through a fascinating
analysis of psychopathological personality types. Alterman and Mattson
document what one can only call the masochistic tendency of American
liberals to choose for their leaders men—and they are, so far, always
men—who are self-impressed, self-righteous, aloof, and not
particularly interested in liberal policies; great disappointments,
every one, whether they win election or not.

In The Cause, this pattern begins with the liberal adoration of Henry
Wallace, the politically clumsy former Republican and alleged
intellectual of Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration—though his
intellectualism may have been evident only when he stood in contrast
to Harry Truman. But the type had its prewar incarnation in Woodrow
Wilson, the Southern racist turned Princeton professor who opposed
Progressivism until he could no longer politically afford to, then
implemented it with reluctance until he could divert himself with a
war.

The exemplary character in the postwar period was Adlai Stevenson, the
egghead who held the political process in utter contempt, disdaining
even to ensure that he kept himself properly clothed and shod—the
lapel pin in the shape of a holey shoe sole became an affectionate
token for his supporters. Alterman and Mattson quote enough of
Stevenson’s misanthropic witticisms to suggest that Stevenson didn’t
care what people thought of him because he didn’t actually care for
people. And it is difficult to be a liberal without empathy for one’s
fellow human beings, which perhaps explains why Stevenson didn’t
support civil rights or public housing, either. This unsympathetic
type of illiberal anti-politician appears repeatedly in the ranks of
allegedly liberal leaders who often display open contempt not only for
politics as usual and the ordinary voter but for liberalism and
liberals: Eugene McCarthy, Jimmy Carter—and Barack Obama, who mocked
liberal critics of his Administration by sarcastically saying, “Gosh,
we haven’t yet brought about world peace, and I thought that was going
to happen quicker.” (His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, called liberals
“fucking retarded,” which was a step too far and drew an apology—not
to liberals, but to the developmentally disabled.)

Certainly, in some cases these leaders’ disinclination to dance with
who brung them had political justifications—not every minute of the
recent past has chimed the liberal hour, and it has often seemed
prudent to put off progress until a more propitious time should
arrive. But equally, in many cases, these leaders clearly nursed a
sense that there is something wrong—perhaps, one gets the sense in The
Cause, something insufficiently masculine—about liberalism. Gloria
Steinem—a gifted writer with, as Alterman and Mattson say, a “genius”
for publicity—wept with frustration and anger because despite her
contributions as fundraiser and speechwriter to the McGovern campaign
she couldn’t get the candidate to take women’s issues seriously. The
demand for toughness pushed anything resembling emotion—including the
essential one, compassion—out of the mainstream of liberal politics.
(Whether a woman president would more easily embrace the liberal
cause, or whether she would more eagerly shun a stereotypical
femininity because she would feel harder pressed to show her
toughness, remains to be seen. But the example of Hillary Clinton’s
rightward run during her campaign suggests the latter.)

As the instance of Woodrow Wilson suggests, the requirement that
eggheads show manliness by striking at those to their left predates
the Cold War, though the pressure to demonstrate toughness on
communism certainly reinforced it. At the same time, it was Wilson’s
antagonist Theodore Roosevelt who showed the way around this
conundrum: Prove your masculinity beyond a doubt, and you can be as
liberal, even radical, as you like. It is the method the
football-playing Kennedys and the swaggering Lyndon Johnson used to
good effect, though it undermined them both when it came to foreign
policy, an arena in which their machismo led them to misrepresent Cold
War crisis and escalate the war in Vietnam.

Apart from the Kennedy brothers (all of whom, even the lately maligned
John, get sympathetic treatment from Alterman and Mattson) and Lyndon
Johnson, there are few liberal leaders personally committed to
liberalism from Truman onward. Indeed, especially in international
affairs, Alterman and Mattson note that their liberals were often
conservatives with a sense of decency: Henry Stimson, George Marshall,
Dean Acheson, and George Kennan all get credit for designing a humane
international order, though none of them was much of a New Dealer, or
even a small-d democrat.

One is necessarily left with the sense that personalities, and
personal misfortunes, occasioned the frequent faltering of the cause.
If only Lyndon Johnson had the courage to take America out of Vietnam.
If only Bill Clinton had the continence to keep his zipper up. If only
Daniel Patrick Moynihan had less “fondness for self-medication” and
had put away the bottle. If only the Kennedys and King had survived
their assassins’ bullets as George Wallace did.

Yet this focus on personal fate cannot tell the whole story. After
all, personal foibles are common on both sides of the political aisle,
but they leave conservatism largely untouched. Certainly the
occasional failing may cost an election here or there, but it does not
damage the right’s ability to carry on. That is partly, as Alterman
and Mattson glancingly note, because of the much greater amount of
money, first increasing in the 1970s and then more sharply in our
time, available to conservatism. But partly too, they suggest, because
liberalism is inherently a fragile position. This is why they circle
back to Trilling: His trademark phrases were variations on the
insistence that “it’s complicated,” and he argued that “between is the
only honest place to be.”

O
f course if you’re trying honestly to occupy the space between, you
need to have something on either side of you. The right in America we have always had with us, at least since the 1930s gave rise to
conservatism in its modern, anti-New Deal form. The left is another
story, one that Kazin tells, also through biography. Beginning with
the abolitionists, he traces the impact of figures on the radical
fringe who sometimes managed to influence the American center.

In Kazin’s narrative, leftists have benefited and suffered from
exogenous influences. They hardly waver from their chosen course, but
they depend on events to usher them onto and off the American stage.
The white South’s treasonous act of secession made the abolitionists
into heroes of the United States. World War I and the Bolshevik
Revolution pushed the socialists offstage. The Great Depression and
the war against fascism made communists into acceptable allies, while
the Cold War sent them packing again—though they also made demands for civil rights seem suddenly pressing. Leftists from Wendell Phillips
and Frederick Douglass through to King and Bayard Rustin applied a
constant pressure, waiting for a crack in the wall so they could rush
through.

But something happened to the left after the 1960s that rendered it
less influential. In part, Kazin says, it was success: So much of what
the early anti-racists and anti-sexists demanded had become
commonplace, even if it got more rhetorical than legislative support.
But more, he says, the world has failed to offer the kind of
challenges that aided leftists before. “Every past left,” Kazin
writes, “had been able to make a moral argument about an inescapable
problem, one that touched the conscience and/or self-interest of most
Americans…from slavery to monopoly to mass unemployment to
fascism to legal racism to the war in Vietnam and the continuing
inequality of women…But nothing so big or important emerged
during the final quarter of the twentieth century.”

The early twenty-first century was different, featuring big and
important episodes aplenty, from the 2000 election through 9/11 and
the Iraq War to the financial collapse and ongoing economic
unpleasantness. But these events found the left unprepared to do more
than sell copies of Naomi Klein books or tickets to Michael Moore
films—or unfortunately, Kazin says, to draw Americans to Howard Zinn’s
radical history of the United States, which documented a
“trans-historical” elite that always defeated the people.

If any trend today can qualify as outrageous enough to reinvigorate
the left, perhaps it is the screws being regularly put to American
youth. The rich members of a generation that received generously
subsidized state university education are saddling their children with
enormous debt in the midst of a depression that affords graduates few
opportunities. Maybe in between bouts of getting tased and
pepper-sprayed, the kids can organize in such a way to inspire
sympathy, and even hope for change. Kazin concludes his book with a
brief for utopias. If the American left has lately lacked an irritant
to spur it forward, it has also lacked inspiration from abroad: The
international left also collapsed over the late twentieth century.
Everywhere—even in some Labour parties—Thatcherism/Reaganism has
triumphed. Indeed, the only utopias today are on the right, where
visionaries imagine self-regulating societies whose armed citizens
civilly roam the streets, incessantly negotiating spot prices for
every good and service imaginable. The left has only the humdrum fact
that the welfare and regulatory states we are so eagerly dismantling
have on average worked rather well, promoting widespread prosperity
and a healthy, educated citizenry. And who can get fired up for that?

How difficult must it be to adhere to the liberal creed. So much ink must be spilt massaging the foibles of racists, elitists, misanthropes, satyrists, etc. What remains under-discussed are the many enduring systemic conditions which prevent liberal reformers from accomplishing much able to stand the tests of time. These conditions include an antiquated and elitist constitution; a decrepit party system; an unwillingness to master the slave question; the persistence of class hatreds; a love of commerce and wealth; the imperial ambitions of the elite; a perceived special relationship with God and historical destiny; etc. We Americans are a cold, calculating and vain people. Our ambitions always exceed our virtues. Should we faithfully follow our liberals as we confront greater problems than we have ever faced before? Not if we are rational.

Jun 12, 2012, 1:03 PM

Ed Shaver:

Yeah, the other problem for liberals: they (we) come up with so many elaborate and well thought out reasons to surrender!

Jun 15, 2012, 6:23 PM

Sana:

This discussion was muidded by the fact that several concepts were insufficiently defined from the beginning. Liberalism (in sum) is a fairly well researched topic, and its definitions are many. There is big-L Liberalism, small-l liberalism, political liberalism, economic liberalism, and social liberalism, to name but a few. As well, distinguishing any or all of these from the several definitions of conservative, would also have been helpful.Also, regarding how liberalism is tied to economy necessarily (ex ante, sumil, ex post) obviously begs those pie discussions; growing, shrinking, rate and percentage), which are always tricky. If we trust economic data that shows slowing American growth much further back than first believed (almost never reported), and greater distributional disparities (almost never reported), then how can one explain why politically liberal Americans continued to purse inclusivity (diversity) and other forms of legal, social, and economic equality despite our worsening economic outcome? At what magic point did we (in the liberal majority or the racist minority) decide that it was time to dial back on quality of others' circumstance? Was it well after we had lost equality of opportunity; in this example, economic equality?Regarding the difference between presidential and parliamentary systems, it seems that Alterman needs to bone up a bit. While each system has its own legal and political idiosyncrasies (not to mention differences within structural and functional class), the differences in terms of legal and political stability especially for well established parliamentary regimes (like France) is not really that great. And, we all know how well both the current Obama administration and the past Bush administration work to get changes made quickly by working behind closed doors through executive fiat and by ignoring (not enforcing) existing laws.As for Alterman's solutions, they all seemed fairly conventional; get money out of politics, challenge anti-government messaging (media), rebuild civil society through support of non-political (or not explicitly political) institutions. Unfortunately, there are plenty of (capital-L) Liberals (on the left and the right) who have been instrumental at (a) accepting money and accepting its status as speech, (b)attacking government by privatizing everything public and advertising it on a supplicant media, and (c) undermining civil society (by not supporting or attacking civic institutions).Sam, I think you did a fine job of revealing some of the holes here (by asking some great questions) left by this interviewee. And, the Majority Report does yeoman work submerged in soup of mainstream media. It seems to me that the biggest controversy with this book is that Alterman criticizes his own, and, no doubt, the targets of his criticism will certainly howl at having been attacked by their brother. But, fratricide is always a successful formula for boosting book sales especially for political ones.

Sep 23, 2013, 12:33 PM

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